There is a certain affinity, apparently at least, between that formal
vice of verbalism and another defect of the mind, whose origins may,
however, be varied. In consideration of some of its most common and
popular effects I will call it _phraseology_, although this word is not
an exact expression of the thing and does not set forth its origin.
For long centuries men have written on history, have explained it, have
illustrated it. The most varied interests, from the interests more
immediately practical to the interests purely aesthetic, have moved
different writers to conceive and to execute this type of composition.
These different types have always taken birth in different countries
long after the origins of civilization, of the development of the state
and of the passage from the primitive communist society to the society
which rests upon class differences and class antagonisms. The
historians, even if they have been as artless as Herodotus, were always
born and formed in a society having nothing ingenuous in it, but very
complicated and complex, and at a time when the reasons for this
complication and complexity were unknown and their origins forgotten.
This complexity, with all the contrasts which it bears within itself and
which it reveals later and makes burst forth in its various
vicissitudes, stood forth before the narrators as something mysterious
and calling for an explanation, and if the historian wished to give some
sequence and a certain connection to the things narrated, he was obliged
to add certain general views to the simple narration. From the jealousy
of the gods of Father Herodotus to the environment of M. Tame, an
infinite number of concepts serving as means of explanation and as
complements to the things related have been imposed upon the narrators
by the natural voices of their immediate thought. Class tendencies,
religious ideas, popular prejudices, influences or imitations of a
current philosophy, excursions of imagination and a desire to give an
artistic appearance to facts known only in a fragmentary fashion, all
these causes and other analogous causes have contributed to form the
substratum of the more or less artless theory of events which is
implicitly at the bottom of the narration, or which serves at least to
flavor and adorn it. Whether men speak of chance or of destiny, whether
they appeal to the providential direction of human events, or adhere to
the word and concept of chance, the only divinity left in the rigid and
often coarse conception of Machiavelli, or whether they speak, as is
frequent enough at the present time, of the logic of events, all these
conceptions were and are effects and results of ingenuous thought, of
immediate thought, of thought which cannot justify to itself its course,
and its products, either by the paths of criticism or by the methods of
experience. To fill up with conventional causes (e. g., _chance_) or
with a statement of theoretical plausibility (e. g., the _inevitable
course of events_ which sometimes is confused in the mind with the
notion of progress) the gaps of our knowledge as to the fashion in which
things have been actually produced by their own necessity without care
for our free will and our consent, that is the motive and the result of
this popular philosophy, latent or explicit, in the chroniclers, which
by reason of its superficial character dissolves as soon as scientific
criticism appears.
In all these concepts and all these imaginings which in the light of
criticism appear as simple provisional devices and effects of an unripe
thought, but which often seem to "cultured people" the _non plus ultra_
of intelligence,--in all these a great part of the human _processus_ is
revealed and reflected; and, consequently, we should not consider them
as gratuitous inventions nor as products of a momentary illusion. They
are a part and a moment in the development of what we call the human
mind. If later it is observed that these concepts and these imaginings
are mingled and confounded in the accepted opinions of cultured people,
or of those who pass for such, they make up an immense mass of
prejudices and they constitute an impediment which ignorance opposes to
the clear and complete vision of the real things. These prejudices turn
up again as etymological derivations in the language of professional
politicians, of so-called publicists and journalists of every kind, and
offer the support of rhetoric to self-styled public opinion.
To oppose and then to replace this mirage of uncritical conceptions,
these idols of the imagination, these effects of literary artifice, this
conventionalism by the real subjects, or the forces which are positively
acting--that is to say, men in their various and diversified social
relations,--this is the revolutionary enterprise and the scientific aim
of the new doctrine which renders objective and I might say naturalizes
the explanation of the historical _processus_.
A certain definite nation, that is to say, not a certain mass of
individuals, but a _plexus_ of men organized in such and such a fashion
by natural relations of consanguinity, or following such or such an
artificial or customary order of relationship and affinity, or by reason
of permanent proximity;--this nation, on a certain circumscribed and
limited territory, having such and such fertility, productive in such
and such a manner acquired through certain definite forms by continuous
labor;--this nation, thus distributed over this territory and thus
divided and articulated by the effect of a definite division of labor
which is scarcely beginning to give birth to or which has already
developed and ripened such and such a division of classes, or which has
already disintegrated or transformed a whole series of classes;--this
nation which possesses such and such instruments from the flint stone to
the electric light and from the bow and arrow to the repeating rifle,
which produces according to a certain fashion and shares its products,
conformably to its way of producing;--this nation, which by all these
relations constitutes a society in which either by habits of mutual
accommodation or by explicit conventions, or by acts of violence
suffered and endured, has already given birth, or is on the point of
giving birth to legal-political relations which result in the formation
of the state;--this nation, which by the organization of the state,
which is only a means for fixing, defending and perpetuating
inequalities, by reason of the antagonisms which it bears within itself,
renders continuously unstable the organization itself, whence result the
political movements and revolutions, and therefore the reasons for
progress and retrogression:--there is the sum of what is at the bottom
of all history. And there is the victory of realistic prose over all the
fantastic and ideological combinations.
Certainly it requires some resignation to see things as they are,
passing beyond the phantoms which for centuries have prevented right
vision. But this revelation of realistic doctrine was not and is not
designed to be the rebellion of the material man against the ideal man.
It has been and is, on the contrary, the discovery of the principles and
the motives which are real and which belong to all human development,
including all that we call the ideal in positive conditions, determined
by facts which carry in themselves the reasons and the law and the
rhythm of their own development.